PAVEL DIAS: FIFTY – BILL JACOBSON: FUNNY, CRY, HAPPY

Agence Vu in Prague

Pavel Dias is an important Czech photojournalist, documentary photographer, and teacher at FAMU. This exhibition at Langhans Gallery Prague presents a cross-section of his life’s work.

Born in 1938, Dias has been making long photo essays since the mid-1950s. In the 1960s his name was linked with the progressive visual look of the Mladý svět weekly. Among the topics that Dias has devoted himself to for several decades now are the world of horse racing in Europe, religious celebrations and rituals, and the present state of former German concentration camps. The exhibition also includes his rare photojournalism of the Soviet-led intervention of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the funeral of Jan Palach (who set himself on fire in protest against the invasion and occupation), the fortieth anniversary of which coincides with the opening of the Langhans exhibition.

In his photojournalism and documentary work, Pavel Dias also focuses on the everyday lives of ordinary people. The exhibition reflects the idea that the life of a photojournalist and documentary photographer entails getting close to his or her subject matter. Dias has devoted himself to his topics for several decades, so his work is naturally imbued with an awareness of the mutual connections and stories related to the people and situations he has photographed.

Bill Jacobson: funny, cry, happy

The best-known photos by an american artist Bill Jacobson (b. 1955) are those from the 1990s. It is in these sets of portraits and urban landscapes that he found the striking boundary between depiction and an abstract style of colour and light, using a ‘soft’, somewhat out-of-focus lens. Whether in the dematerialized portraits and male nudes or the pictures of New York City streets, he has employed this technique to achieve a highly emotional effect.

In his exhibition at Langhans Gallery Prague, he will be showing early untitled black and white photographs from the 1970s, as well as the more recent color series, funny, cry, happy (2004-2007). Together, both bodies of work depict an artist deeply observing the world around him over the course of thirty years of making pictures. And while he is continually interested in the way the world looks, the images suggest a parallel interest in what the world means.

The series funny, cry, happy invites the viewer to participate in the patient observation of apparently banal slices of reality, and it gradually expands his or her ability to perceive Jacobson’s extraordinary feel for interweaving the ordinary and the intimate spaces in which one lives.

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